I understand the hassle that this caused you, QuickieSuxx. 

I'm here to shares some details about the error that you've encountered in QuickBooks Online.

First, you can manually remove the taxes on the transactions. All you have to do is deselect the TAX column. Then, Save and close.

If the issue still persists, you can perform some basic trouble shooting steps. 

To check if the browser is already full of frequently accessed page resources, causing some unusual responses, try signing into your QBSE using a private browser (incognito).

Here's how:

• Press Ctrl + Shift + N (Google Chrome)
• Ctrl + Shift + P (Firefox)
• Control + Option + P (Safari)

If it works, return to your default browser and perform a clear cache to refresh the system. However, if the issue persists, try using other supported browsers.

As mentioned by my colleague above, after you activated the automatic sales tax, you're unable to turn it off in QuickBooks Online. Though, you can edit the customer's tax information to ensure you will not collect any taxes.

I'll guide you how.

1. Go to the Sales tab and then select Customers.
2. Click the Edit tab.
3. Open the Tax info folder and select the Default tax code.
4. Click on Save.

The tax rate will no longer apply every time you create an invoice for this customer

Additionally, I've added an article that'll help you to file your sales tax return and record your tax payment in QuickBooks Online. To learn more about the process, please click here. 

Reach out to me if you have additional inquiries about Sales Tax or any QuickBooks related. I want to make sure you're taken care of. 

Why is the turn off sales tax button even an option if it does not work??? I cannot import invoices from my shop software because of the sales tax and I do not want to keep manually importing invoices! This needs to be fixed ASAP.

Hi @Kraknmobile,

I would also feel the same with the issue if I'm unable to turn off the automated sales tax feature. Allow me to chime in and help you with your tax concern in QuickBooks Online.

The sales tax button will only work if there are no transactions created in the account. Also, this issue happens when there are zero dollar transactions tied to a zero balance sales tax line item.

Affected users will need to review the transactions remove any sales tax entries or delete/void the invoices in question. Since you've mentioned that you don't collect sales tax and never have, I recommend contacting our QuickBooks Support Team.

One of them will assist you further with the sales tax issue. Our support for Plus, Essentials, Simple Start is available from 6 AM - 6 PM PT (Monday - Friday) and 6 AM - 3 PM PT (Saturday). For Advanced, any time, any day.

Here's how you can reach them:

1. Click the Help tab in the upper-right corner.
2. Go to the Assistant tab.
3. Click Get help from a human.
4. Choose Chat with us or Have us call you. 

I've attached a link you can check out to know more about how you can personalize your sales forms in QuickBooks: Customizing Invoices Within QuickBooks Online.

I'm just a post away if you have any other questions about disabling sales tax in QBO. Take care.

There is not an option to select non taxable! Please help, this service is not taxable and I cannot use it to bill!

Ok, that was confusing, I continued to ‘search’ it let me ‘choose more’ and FINALLY  gave me the option to mark no taxable! Phew! That was sure complicated!!!

Your phone support team was absolutely no help and the issue still remains. From reading other users, even if I go and mark every single thing as non taxable I will still be unable to turn off sales tax so I'm not going to waste my time doing that. Is there a way to sign up for a new account and transfer all my current data over and turn off sales tax before hand? I cannot auto import invoices from Shop Ware because of the auto sales tax. The brilliant advice I was given is to turn off sales tax in Shop Ware, which would then mean none of my customers would see the tax. That obviously won't work so I need a way of turning off auto sales tax or I'm gonna find a new software for accounting because this is a ridiculous issue.

I am having the same issue and it all started today!! It won't allow me to send an invoice without a tax!

Thanks for getting back to us, Eveyjoy.

The steps shared by my colleagues should help you send invoices successfully in QuickBooks Online (QBO). Since you're unable to view the forms, I'd suggest contacting our Customer Support Team. They can investigate this further. Just follow the steps below on how to reach them.

For the new Help menu:

1. Click the Help (?) icon at the top.
2. Type Talk to a human.
3. Enter your issue or question on the What can we help you with box.
4. Choose I still need a human.
5. Select the Start messaging option.

Furthermore, visit our Taxes Help Articles. This page contains steps on how to manage your tax preparation, reports, forms, and more.

If you have any other concerns or follow-up questions, you’re always welcome to tag me in your reply. I’m just a few clicks away from you. Have a great day and keep safe

Hi Eveyjoy, 

I have been getting the same issue when the tax is set to "Based On Location" all day. It is a new occurrence and QBO people on the web in forums are noticing the same. I am assuming its a software anomaly.

Fix for me: I manually changed the tax to the "State Tax" and sent it directly. If I try to save and then wait and send it, the invoice automatically shifts bac to "Based On Location" and it will create an error. 

If you are sending it, I would use another tax option and then go right to 'save &send' until QBO can resolve the problem. (It is ironic since none of the invoices I sent out today even had a taxable charge on the invoice.) They still failed on tax calculations when the invoice reverted back to 'Based on location'.

pitkrew,

Your comment is extremely accurate. Nothing is there. 

And of course 'MaryLandT 's recommendation use to be a function, but now is removed. Everything I enter now as non-taxable items becomes taxed. And the tax calculator that is 'based on location' is extremely erratic. I am constantly apologizing, triple-checking invoices, and correcting QBO's tax issues daily. 

It use to be a simple function of setting up whether or not a item should have tax,  and you could set-up the basic tax. Now that they injected the default 'Based on Location' and took the rest of the functions away it has become a nightmare.

I would really like someone to call me I turned on the auto sales tax for an hour and would like to remove and I am unable - PLEASE CALL me ASAP [removed]

Hi there, @Michele67a. Turning off the sales tax in QuickBooks Online (QBO) is unavailable.

This option is only available for old QuickBooks users using manual calculation. You can follow these steps if you used to have the manual sales tax calculation and wants to switch back to it:
 

1. In the left navigation bar, go to Taxes.
2. Select Sale Tax.
3. Click Sales tax settings in the upper right corner.
4. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see "Want to temporarily switch to the old tax center? Switch here."
5. Click the here link.
    

However, if you're using a brand new QuickBooks account with automated sales tax enabled, you can disable taxes on your inventory and uncheck the sales tax on each line item on the form before saving it. For more details about managing sales tax, you can check out this article: Learn how QuickBooks Online calculates sales tax.
 

I also recommend speaking with our Customer Care Team. They have the available tools that can set your sales tax feature to manual. Please check out our support hours to ensure that we address your concerns on time.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have additional questions about sales taxes or any QuickBooks concerns. I'm always ready to help. Take care!

SOOO absurd that you can't just turn it off.   I keep being told you can only turn it off on desktop. Yet the feature to turn it off is in QB online, it just doesn't work.  As for your so called " care team".... they are completely useless and beyond incompetent. They will spend hours trying to figure out how to do something that can't be done because despite working there and supposedly being trained..... they know absolutely NOTHING. Calls pretty much involved the CUSTOMER telling them what to do and how to trouble shoot.  IT IS A FRIGGIN JOKE. 

Is there any resolution to this yet? One of my clients uses Jobber. When it is synced into QBO the automatic taxes are set to location. Well the customers billing area is not always the same as the service area. So this automatic feature really messes up things. We do charge sales tax with some customers so the option to go through and change everything in between non taxable to taxable would be just a waste of time. Please fix this and take off the Auto feature. We never turned it on to begin with and are now stuck with it. 

Still no resolution to this??? We have had this issue for months now... My company is now going into our busy season where we send hundreds of invoices out per month... We are completely unable to utilize the "Import Invoice" feature because at one point in time we enabled Sales Tax, and now now cannot turn it off.  It is not feasible for us to manually click through each invoice. We need a fix to this ASAP.

When I go to Sales>Invoices>Import Invoices, we are presented with this:

Lovely. So I go Taxes>Sales Tax>Sales Tax Settings>Turn off Sales Tax, and am presented with this bundle of fun:

I have disabled all of my 'Tax Agencies' and 'Custom Rates' and am still not able to 'Turn off Sales tax'.  I have even gone through every transaction to ensure no transactions have Sales Tax applied... nothing works.....grrrrrr!

Need help ASAP!

Hi ccaffrey, I can see how important to use the Import invoices feature in QuickBooks successfully.

At this moment, we're unable to turn off the Sales tax feature since we activated it and used tax agencies and custom rates. Thus, we'll see an error message when utilizing the Import invoices.

Let's send your valuable feedback to our Product Development team. Sign in to your QuickBooks Online account and share your insights about importing invoices and turning off the automated sales tax. I'll show you how:

1. Go to the Gear icon.
2. Select Feedback under Profile.
3. Enter your suggestion. Then, click Next.

Alternatively, we can use a third-party application to help achieve in importing invoices. We can go to our website to look for third-party software compatible with QuickBooks: QuickBooks Apps Store.

We can visit these articles to learn more about handling sales, income, and customers in the program:

• Invoices and payments
• Sales and customers

Let me know if you have other concerns about importing data and managing sales tax. I'll help you in any way that I can.

@SarahannC I'm not sure you understand. My company has never used Sales Tax and we don't have any active transactions with applicable Sales Tax applied. We merely turned it on to see it's functionality. It makes zero sense why it cannot be turned off and it now hinders a vital component of QBO. There must be a way to resolve this. 

Please escalate this issue as this is clearly a critical problem that several users are having with zero resolution provided. We all pay a lot of money to utilize QBO and it makes no sense for us to lose functionality with no justification, then have to pay a third-party for a capability that we have historically always had. Very frustrating. 

Totally feel the same way!! Why, why, why can't we turn off a feature we don't want or need??????

QBO drives me crazy and this is just one of the MANY reasons why. What a complete time sink this is.

I have informed MY community to stay away from this train-wreck of an application.

I so agree. I spent over 5 hours today with "customer support" or "care team" or whatever they call it. They waste your time saying that they want to help, but they cannot fix piece of sh*t software app that is QBO.

Two years later and this is still a thing!? 

I'd love to have been in the meeting where someone said: "What happens if someone wants to disable this?" 

Was the response: "F them."? 

How is custom software that uses their own tax rates, or say using Avalara's API to get the tax amount for special use cases able to submit the proper tax, so that invoices can be true'd up. Right now I'm running into an issue where we are using avalara to get accurate sales tax and it's being ignored during an invoice sync. 

Then, when I login to the UI, Quickbooks is like "Yeah, I see you tried to set the tax rate, but we don't care, here's the new value.. sorry about your integration though.." 

And it seems the next step is to.. and I can't believe this is the case.. but... Create a new quickbooks account and pray to god nobody accidentally enables this "feature" ? 

Hello. There are no "Turn off sales tax" button on Sales tax setting.

Hi there, @kalininsolvensy. I'm here to share information about turning off sales tax.

There is no option to turn off the automated sales option in QuickBooks Online (QBO) once activated. Feel free to read this article for additional details on how QBO handles automatic sales tax: Set up and use automated sales tax in QuickBooks Online.

To get around this, you can choose not to charge tax when making an invoice for the goods and services. You can also exempt your customers from paying taxes. You can achieve this by following the instructions provided by my colleague Jovychris_A.

It's simple to check your sales tax payable in QBO. Run the Sales Tax Liability report to accomplish this. Before submitting your tax return, you can use this to ensure everything is in order.

You can click the Reply button below if you have questions about sales tax. I'm always here to help. Have a great day.

To repeat the most important portion of your post THERE IS NO MEANS TO TURN OFF AUTOMATED SALES TAX.

QBO you have completely failed the user community in this regard. Choosing not to charge tax when creating an invoice is NOT A SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM. It is unbelievable that you would make such a suggestion. Stop posting this nonsense to the user community - we are NOT amused.

QBO you are messing with Sales Tax, payments and reporting to state authorities. I have elevated this situation to our local and state political representative with the intention that they will put legal pressure on QBO to resolve this problem and provide users with a means of turning off this infuriating "feature" which I never chose to activate in the first place. 

In the meantime, QBO,  stop posting worthless and ineffective "work arounds" - you are wasting our time.

I too have this problem with QBO with several clients I encouraged to go to QBO.   This is a QuickBooks flaw and apparently the programmers never actually worked with Invoice processing with nontaxable business or multi state taxing.

The auto Sales Tax feature someone thought was a great idea does not work with 3rd party integrations.  It creates a nightmare on the ledgers.  Then the blame game begins.

And who ever posted "go into every customer and/or item" change their settings do not understand the complexities and volume that can take place with sales receipts and/or invoicing and integrations with other programs.  

This feature needs to be scrapped and the old system brought back.

Just my opnion

I have added a tax rate and an agency but this has started another problem . I am unable to import bulk invoices now and gives an error that Qb is not ready for sales tax. I have deactivated the agency and tax rates form the tax>sales tax menu but that still does not help. how do i reverse this so i can import invoices